Bruce Hall and Chouki El Hamel have recently engaged with the topic of race in North-West Africa. As part of their discussions both authors make reference to the oft-used geographic term balad al-Sūdān (land of the blacks). In describing its meaning, both Hall and El Hamel begin with the riḥla (journey) of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. According to Hall, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa “brought with him a North African conception of racial difference that appears to have been unfamiliar to the people with whom he interacted” (Hall 34). Similarly, for El Hamel Ibn Baṭṭūṭa “made critical observations that sharply stigmatized what he considered pagan attitudes of black populations” (El Hamel 72). Yet, neither study, makes reference to the development and interpretation of balad al-sūdān in Mālikī fiqh (jurisprudence). In fact, El Hamel refuses to use the Islamic legal tradition since, in his mind, it presupposes a link between blackness and slavery. Though Hall and El Hamel are correct in their plea for a more nuanced understanding of race in Saḥaran and sub-Saharan Africa, their neglect of Mālikī legal texts represents a gap in their research methodologies. As Jocelyn Hendrickson has noted, a detailed analysis of legal documents - with context in mind - adds important dimensions to our understanding of culture and society. Therefore, this paper tracks the interpretation of balad al-sūdān through Mālikī legal texts, extracting cultural and social artifacts from their legal tradition. I follow the use of “balad al-sūdān” as it appears in commentaries on Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawānī’s Risāla. Al-Qayrawānī writes: “It is disapproved of to trade in the land of the enemy and the land of the blacks.” I thus track the juxtaposition of these two geographic terms (land of the enemy and land of the blacks) as a way to follow the cultural and social conceptions of balad al-sūdān in Mālikī fiqh. I will demonstrate that even though the term implies a racial category, the inflection found in the commentaries rarely recognizes a racial element. Instead, the geographic term fluctuates between indicating the ‘land of the enemy’ to an area governed by Muslims but still dangerous to the traveler. This focused analysis across a temporal range of Mālikī commentaries demonstrates how jurisprudential scholars continuously fought to buttress al-Qayrawānī’s original statement even when varying conceptions of culture and society altered the method of justification. Yet, these conceptions of culture and society never focused on race but rather changing religious norms.